


On the Curious Case of the Vanishing Boy

by kleos_aphthit0n



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternative Universe - Archaeology, Alternative Universe - Lovecraft, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:55:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kleos_aphthit0n/pseuds/kleos_aphthit0n
Summary: An Avengers and Young Avengers Lovecraftian Mystery AUNo prior knowledge of Lovecraft literature required!
Relationships: Billy Kaplan & Tommy Shepherd, Cassie Lang/Nate Richards, David Alleyne/Tommy Shepherd, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Kate Bishop/Tommy Shepherd, Teddy Altman/Billy Kaplan
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	On the Curious Case of the Vanishing Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An archeologist, a highschool student, and a thief.
> 
> In the ruins of old Genosha, archaeologist Steve Rogers makes a startling discovery about the origins of human civilization.  
> Meanwhile, Billy Kaplan arrives at St. Castle's Academy for Young Gentlemen, an elite boarding school with a checkered history and dubious dining etiquette.  
> And in the bowels of the infamous city of Arkham, the thief-king rules the night with fleet-footed flight.

Steve 

Steve Rogers hums a satisfied sound as he pinches a bit of the soil and rolls it between his fingertips. _More clay than loam,_ he concludes easily. It has a coarse feel to it and slightly wet but it also has a sticky, yielding quality that makes him wonder about the strange flowers that he saw inside the cave, emerging from the cracks and crevices, which on hindsight probably said a lot about the structural integrity of the place. He squeezed the piece flat and wipes it on the ground. _Clay, not loam_ , he thinks to himself again as he files the information away in the carefully organized cabinet of his mind, in the Genosha drawer, inside the folder labeled "Caves", and under the section that says "Pecularities"

He hums again as he looks for something else to distract himself from his present predicament and failing.

He checks his digital watch and swallows the creeping anxiety that bloomed there. How long have they been there? In just a few minutes, it will be twenty hours since the cave collapsed over their head but it felt so much longer than that. His head throbs from the migraine he knew was coming, his legs are burning for holding that folded position for so long, and his neck was cramping from having to stoop under the hard rock over his head.

Their pocket of space is dank, dark, and suffused with the stink of terror and piss. It was a stroke of luck that nobody died at the initial cave-in (doubly lucky too, since Steve doesn't think he's equipped to deal with the intimate terror of being trapped with a corpse much less pacify his students) but whatever relief the team felt has long dissipated once other dangers made themselves known. Steve thinks about them again, now: the most immediate threat of dehydration (though they'd brought plenty of supply for that and most their jugs had survived the collapse), starvation perhaps (and Steve wonders again whether he had the stomach for cannibalism if it came to that), or injury or disease (luckily, no one had spiked a fever and aside from a few bruises and one dislocated shoulder that he himself reduced.) Then of course there was the psychocolical threat: the genetic violence to which men succumb when they find themselves trapped together in unfamiliar adversity for protracted periods of time.

He recounts and imagines the many ways he could die in that cave, all the things he said he'd do but hasn't yet, and all the people he'll left behind and yet right there, in that moment in the dark on the very precipice, he cannot stop himself from grinning.

And why not? The world is changed and only he knows. 

He smiles to himself, keeping the discovery close to his heart, turning it and poking it, testing all the ways it could be challenged and always coming up with the indomitable certainty that this theory must stand. He relishes the fact that right now, in that very moment, he is the only person in all the world who knows. The only person who knows that before Genosha, there was something else. It was _his_ discovery and soon enough, everyone will know. He will make sure of that.

_Drip… drip… drip..._

He cranes his neck around slowly, squinting in the dark, and watches each of his companions: the two operators of the Stark excavators, the one porter, and the three grad students he’d brought along from Arkham.Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is scared. And it all shows on their faces, illuminated by that sickly green glow of glowstick light that they scattered on the ground. 

This is not Steve's first cave-in, unlikely to be his last but admittedly his longest so far. The rest of the dig team—all six of them—look green and fresh, not yet the veteran avalanche survivor that he is. He makes sure to remember each name so they can at least share a piece of the glory of his discovery.

The discovery… Yes… thinking about it still makes the hairs on his arms stand.

And to think that such a momentous thing is owed to something so fickle as serendipity. 

They were at the dig site, a newly unearthed section off the western face of a Genoshan mountain, near one of the known sites of pagan worship at the outskirts of the old capital. It was a career-making stroke of luck (or will be, at least, if they survive this) when one of the new Stark excavators malfunctioned and revealed the tunnel. If one of the Stark men hadn’t accidentally dug through the wrong section of a wall (a load-bearing wall, it later turned out, the very same that precipitated the cave-in three hours later), with the rotating bit set accidentally too high, and at an angle that was off by twelve degrees, they never would have found the hidden entrance to that ancient tunnel that may now very well be their tomb too.

 _Eureka_ , indeed.

The walls were etched with your garden variety symbolisms and imageries of ancient Genoshan life: the hunts, the human sacrifices, the tidal waves that came and went and came again and the hidden unspeakable terror in the sea that hurled them. On foot, Iit took nearly three hours to reach the end of the tunnel where they were surprised to find an altar of polished stone (too smooth for the tools of Genosha Anciens he realizes now). He grinned to himself then when he realized that the engravings in the wall behind aren’t quite in High Genoshan but something altogether more primordial and he grins to himself now when the knowledge hits him again.

Steve Rogers is about to rewrite the history of Genosha Anciens and, in extension, all the rest of human history.

Steve Rogers is about to become a very famous man in the world.

And of course, that was when the mountain decided that it would keep that secret to itself. It all happened so quickly. There was a powerful sound, like a crack nothing like anything Steve had encountered in previous archeological mishaps and then there was that pure terror of seeing the ceiling slowly crack and shatter, followed very quickly by the earth collapsing on them. 

Thankfully, primary survey showed no one was injured. They had water, granola bars, and enough glowsticks to throw a rave. And so, following Arkham University protocol, he told his team to take one deep breath and relax. The camp will send rescue in a few hours, after someone realizes that the team hasn't checked in. Then, he closed his eyes and slept.

Twenty hours later and still trapped in the dark, he allows himself a moment of despair. He imagines dying of thirst, that slow agony of the body that quickly turns into an agony of the mind, and he thinks of his students and Nat and Buck. But he doesn't let the poison stick; he chases it away with scenes of imagined glory. Of triumph and vindication. Of the envy that this discovery will inspire in his colleagues at Arkham University once he publishes. Oh, the entire Archeology Department frowned and scoffed and harrumphed when they received the request to send someone from their illustrious ranks to a Genoshan expedition to test out the new Stark Excavators ( _X-cavers,_ Steve mentally corrects himself with a roll of his eyes). 

_My expeditioning days are behind me,_ the polite ones said with a rueful smile, when their age could just justify it. _These old bones could not possibly..._

 _Too banal_ , the more honest ones said with an impatient wave of the hand. _What more is there to write about Genosha?_

And so the disagreeable task fell to the youngest member of faculty, a newly minted professor looking to make his mark, who is senior enough not to embarrass the suits from Stark Industries (whose CEO also happened to be the University’s biggest alumnus benefactor) but not so senior that he could say no. 

Oh, the look on Schmidt’s face when he returns home and publishes his paper—no, _book_. Sweet, sweet victory. 

The books… the conferences… the tv interviews… if there were a Nobel Prize for this, he would win it.

His mom would have been so proud.

He just has to... not die. Which is not an quite assured feat, at this moment.

“Dr. Rogers,” one of the grad students whispers, the voice barely echoing in the cramped space of the cave. “The script doesn’t match the chronology.”

The sound of human voice breaks his reverie but does not quite bring him to the conversation at hand, which seems to be a continuation of an earlier discourse. Instead, his mind begins to wander again. His foremost thought now is that they will run out of water soon and that they’ll have to resort to the trickle of cave-water dripping somewhere deeper down the cave. He fondly remembers another trip a few years back, that three-day diarrhea after he drank from a clean-looking stream in the Amazon, and recites to himself now the constellations of symptoms of giardia and cholera and Naegleria fowleri and all the other hidden pathogens that might be lurking in the untreated freshwater.

“Prof,” the voice insisted.

“What’s that?” he asks, clearing his mind of things he can’t control anyway and putting on his Professor’s voice. He cups his hands over his cheeks and gives himself a gentle slap.

“You asked me why the etchings are strange,” the voice whispers again. “The script doesn’t match the known chronology of the Chinese-Genoshi trade route.”

Shuri then. A bright young thing who has the habit of making the other two grad students look like undergrads. It only took a couple of days for Steve to be impressed with the kid’s keen mind and her unfazed dedication to the archeological mission despite their current predicament earned her more stars in his book. He’s willing to bet that this isn’t _her_ first cave-in either.

“Correct.” He turns to his right to look at the other grad students, making sure that they’re paying attention to him now because he’s about to change their lives. “You might have noticed that the engravings are vertically arranged in the style of old Oriental cultures.

“But the alphabet itself is in High Genoshi. A cumbersome, inefficient alphabet which quickly went extinct even before the Genoshi people started trading with the Indians, who also wrote horizontally and not vertically. And I hope you’ve all done your readings because then you’d remember that High Genoshi is unique in that it is written in _circular_ fashion, to mirror the motion of Earth around the sun. This means, these engravings predate the earliest known contact between the Genoshi civilization and _any_ other civilization by almost fifteen centuries.

“And the important thing… probably the _most_ critical thing… is the presence of curving strokes in the characters.”

He pauses, letting his words sink in.

“High Genoshi is characterized by clean, quick strokes. Straight lines. With the tools they had then, curved etchings are an almost impossible artistry. These engravings should not exist,” one of the other grad students says. Parker. Also clever but not like Shuri. “Or we’re looking at a major paradigm shift.”

 _Bingo_ , Steve thinks giddily.

“What do you think?” Steve asks the third student, Ned.

“I think you’re gonna be famous when we get home,” the boy says. “They’ll probably make fun of you first though because this is Genosha we’re talking about. Oh, man, they’re gonna hate on you so much...”

Steve has to suppress a laugh. One of the excavators looks over at them with an air of disapproval and shakes his head. 

“You’re right. High Genoshi died very early in the course of Genoshi civilization. Record-keeping was laborious and practical, reserved only for their most important records like religious rituals, laws, and maybe bloodlines. And the ancient Genoshi were not known to express their art in their penmanship, unlike what you see in Chinese or Japanese calligraphy.” Steve leans closer to his students and whispers conspiratorially. “The picture of the engravings and the figurines on the altar will suffice. Once we get home, we can get the paint chips dated as well and we’ll know just how old these engravings really are. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me something else about the paint chips.” 

He gives them a minute to mull it over and just as he’s about to give them the answer, Peter snaps his fingers. “The color,” the young man says triumphantly. “Genosha Anciens didn’t have the local resources or technology to create the pigment for this shade of red but the Chinese did which means…” Peter trails off and Steve could see his eyes widen as the epiphany hits him. “Holy shit.”

Steve nods. He had stumbled onto the discovery of the decade—the century, maybe.

“In fact, the alphabet is not quite High Genoshi,” Steve continues for the kid. “You can still see some atavistic strokes that are superfluous to the exhaustively studied High Genoshi.”

The three students nod in unison.

“This is an older script. Proto-Genoshi, if you’d allow me the conceit of naming it.”

The students look at each other, grin, and nod again.

“But I’ll have to consult a linguist when we get home to make sure.”

Peter and Ned were nodding again but Shuri is frowning and chewing her lip. 

“You’re not convinced,” Steve says. A statement of fact.

“It could just be a subculture,” she says. “The simplest explanation that doesn’t require overturning decades of scholarship on Genosha Anciens. It could just be some fringe community that had its own writing style.”

“But that doesn’t explain the pigment,” Ned says before Steve could answer. “No matter how you cut it, the Genoshi wouldn’t have been able to manufacture that paint without foreign pigment.”

“Or the curving strokes,” Peter adds.

“Well, it could be a subgroup of Genoshi during the Silk Era that was fascinated with the older script. Cultures are not homogenous things, you know?” Shuri argues back. Her voice has begun to rise and Steve has to place a hand on her arm to calm her down. “That would also be the period of time that you’d expect the Genoshi to emulate artistic penmanship from their trade partners.”

Ned snorts. “Or it could be aliens or snake people or freaking _Wakandans_ ,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “You can’t just invent a new subgroup like that. Occam’s razor cuts both ways. There are no records of such groups and if there’s anything every Genoshan scholar can agree on it’s that the Genoshi are a people who never look back. This sort of romanticism of the past goes against the bedrock of Genoshi values.” 

Shuri stares at him for a moment, chewing her lip again. “You’re right. I yield to Occam's Razor. And we haven’t even considered yet the actual _content_ of the script,” she concedes, nodding. “Maybe if we knew what it’s saying, we can correlate it to the known time periods…”

Steve nods along his students now. It must have made a funny sight, the four of them bobbing their heads as they look at each other. Yet this is what he enjoys most about academia: the discourse, the exchange of ideas, the vivisection of long-held assumptions which could only be permitted by the inviolable doctrine that no theory must be held sacred and beyond reproach.

He leans back and listens to his grad students poke and test his hypothesis, making notes in his mind and rehearsing the rebuttals he'll have to write. 

Steve Rogers may die in a cave-in and he has never been happier.

Rescuers break through the stone an hour after the last canister of water ran out. It was all so very professional, just as one would expect from anyone working in Stark Industries. They spend an hour carefully moving the rocks to make a wide and stable enough crawlspace, four hours to get everyone and their samples out, and then another hour to transport them to the nearest campsite.

There, medics shove needles in Steve’s arms and pump him full of saline. They take four-hourly measurements and after a day of observation, when no one died or had a seizure, they discharge everyone from the dig team. Steve and his grad students make a point to tip everyone generously.

With one afternoon left to do with as they please, the grad students decided that they’ll leave behind the cobwebs Genosha Anciens and explore the wonders of modern Genosha: cheap malls, cheap clubs, and cheap booze. They’ve had enough ruins for now and there was nothing in the museums that they couldn't explain better than the local experts. On any other expedition, Steve would have joined them but the siren call of a manuscript begging to be written is too strong to resist. So after declining the obligatory invitation that students politely extend to their mentors on these trips, he packs his laptop, notebooks, and water bottle, puts on his hiking shoes, and sets off in the direction of a steep hill overlooking the bay.

It is a short hike, slightly shorter than two and a half hours, and the air is fresh and the trail picturesque. He might have taken pictures for Bucky if his camera hadn't been a casualty of the cave-in and at one point he even considers sketching a deer he saw grazing near the forest edge. It looks like one of those mutant species that Genosha is so famous for, if its leaf-bearing antlers are anything to go by. But the day is growing short and he has work to do so he turns away and continues up the trail. At the peak, where the ground suddenly becomes grassy and flat, Steve finds the quaint little coffee place that cantilevered precariously over the bay.

Steve found a table near the unbarricaded edge and ensconces himself there. For the next few hours, he works hunched over on his laptop, fueled by a steady supply of cappuccino. Every hour or so, he casts his glance across western bay, noting the passage of time as the sun gradually turns from yellow to orange to the famous Genoshi purple… The bruised sun of Genosha, it is known, and Steve writes down a reminder to look up a scientific explanation to the phenomenon later. But for now, he chooses to relish the moment and so he places hands behind his head, leans back, and stretches his legs. He sighs contentedly and smiles as the purple sun finally dips past the blue horizon, creating the illusion of the sun melting into the ocean _._

It is every bit as beautiful as he remembers.

“In summary, there is compelling evidence that points to an anachronism, specifically a civilization predating Genosha, sufficiently advanced to possess artistic sensibilities for the embellishment of the alphabet with smooth and curving lines and also the technology to engrave that into hard stone,” he whispers to the recorder that Bucky gave him for his birthday. With an apologetic smile, he waves off the server when he offers another cup. “Outstanding tasks include one: dating the samples of paint chips and a full spectrographic analysis of its chemical composition with cross-reference to all known pigments and two: consulting linguist Natasha Romanoff on possible proto-Genoshi alphabet and translating the script.”

He retires the recorder to his bag and takes a sip of his now-cold coffee. 

Just to his left, a young Genoshi couple is making out, exchanging sweet nothings in the modern tongue. Steve wonders if the modern Genoshi (Genoshans now in the contemporary parlance) appreciate all the history that surrounds them. Do they know that they live in _the_ cradle of civilization? That it was the crossroads of commerce of antiquity? That much of what we know about the migrations of ancient peoples and the rise and fall of economic powers have all been gleaned from the records of Genosha?

_The Genoshi are a people who never look back._

He sheds the thought and turns his attention back to the task ahead.

A paradigm shift is no small feat and for that, he needs allies. No way his seniors and colleagues would let him publish his findings without challenge. And leading that inquisition will be Schmidt who will hurl every obscurity of Genoshi history at Steve’s theory until it breaks apart. 

Tapping his fingers on the teak table, Steve realizes he needs someone who has experience with anachronisms. He spends a few minutes googling for relevant papers but he doesn’t recognize any of the authors. He is just about ready to give up when the waiter places a pot of tea on the table, as is Genoshan custom to always end a meal with tea no matter the occasion. The tea is no doubt brewed from the local blue blossoms but the pot itself is of unmistakable Chinese design.

Steve freezes for a moment.

_Wilson._

Five years ago, the man rattled Anthropology circles after discovering fragments of pottery in Kyoto, which he dated to 700BC, almost five centuries earlier than the Chinese discovery of the archipelago. That was a real mess right there and until now many anthropologists are still disputing the veracity of his findings and some have even taken to calling the whole thing a hoax and the man himself a fraud. A quick google search shows that Wilson hasn't published in almost four years and Steve swallows back the fear. It is a cautionary tale and if he doesn''t learn from Wilson’s experience, he’s bound to end up ostracized as well.

He looks at his watch. Tokyo is only a few hours ahead of Genosha and if he were lucky, Wilson could get back to him before he gets on his flight back to the States in the morning.

Steve shakes his head and remembers that Wilson attended St. Castle’s two years before he did. They never had occasion to talk to each other and he’s pretty sure Wilson won’t remember him. But Wilson had been famous even then. After all, who could forget the only black boy in St. Castle’s all those years ago? Steve blushes at the thought; those were different times, of course, though if Bucky’s stories could be believed, not much has changed to this date. 

“Your steadfast walls shall be my shield, my keen mind thy sword to wield; glory, glory St. Castle...” Steve mumbles to himself as he types out his email.

This is not Steve’s first brush with a Castle alum and in his experience, there is no surer foundation to friendship as shared misery in that wretched place. 

Billy 

At six pm, on the dot, a sleek black sedan begins to make its long serpentine climb up Castle Hill, whose treacherous, precipitous drop has been artfully hidden from sight by the meticulously manicured forestry that disguised the mountain’s true nature and height. 

It is at this point in their two-hour drive from Arkham City that Billy Kaplan finally rouses himself from sleep, hoping to see the expanse of ancient forest that stretched away from the city’s southwest borders. Here was the famous vastness of ice-cold rivers and ancient trees, of deep jungle darkness and its graveyard stillness so thick that no light of sun or eye of man has seen its black fertile soil. This is Terra incognita, unmolested by civilization since the seafarers of old Arkham first made landfall.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one was around,” Billy murmurs as he pressed his face against the window and stared at the treeline and the impenetrable black. “Does it make a sound?”

The car, though alone on the road, slows down as the road gently slopes up, its engines diminuted to a gentle purr while it gently navigates the tight curves and increasingly steep incline. Out of habit, Billy takes out his phone and starts the timer.

The gradient grew steeper relentlessly, so much so that Billy feels gravity pulling him deep into the cushion of his seat. Steeper and steeper and improbably steeper still until it created the sense of something not quite vertigo but something closer to _almost_ falling _._ Then, just as BIlly is sure the car will slide off the asphalt, the road levels off to an immediate flatness.

 _Half an hour_ , he notes from his phone, just as a heavy downpour breaks. _Half an hour to drive up the mountain._

They gradually pick up the speed, from a crawl to a comfortable cruising pace, no doubt meant to give the passengers the opportunity to see St. Castle’s famous statuary of beasts and men. No point anyway, in this weather, but that doesn’t stop Billy from trying. Outside the windows, he could just about make out the formless hulking masses of ancient stone littering the grounds outside the castle walls. He knows that they are horses and deer and other magnificent creatures worthy of sculpture but under the heavy rain they all seem almost monstrous in their misshapen form.

He watches them, awed and somewhat fearful, until finally, at a quarter before seven, the ancient gates of St. Castle’s Academy for Young Gentlemen swing open to welcome the sleek black sedan into its well-paved driveway. Billy rubs his eyes, stares at the facade, and sees nothing beyond the gray pall of rain and fog.

“Oh, Billy, sweetheart, I wish you’d abandon this notion of yours. As romantic as this all sounds, this is not the place for you,” his mother says, sitting prim and proper across him, her spine ramrod straight. They managed an uncomfortable silence since the car left the hotel but now at the final stretch, she finally gives in. Today she is clad in her battle armor: black suit, shimmering pearls, and hair whipped up in a tight bun. Not a single thing about her betrayed the dizzying anxiety of their ascent. “Honestly, Billy. If this is about boys, Manhattan has a good enough spread, I think.”

“Mom…” Billy rolls his eyes.

“Would you at least reconsider Paris?” She leans over and takes his hands in hers. “Or Italy? You remember that time we summered in Florence, don’t you, sweetheart? What was that boy’s name again? Oh, you remember how much you swooned, don't you? You wouldn’t stop gushing all over the altar boy. What was his name again?”

“Rafael,” he lies because he doesn’t remember.

“Oh, yes, Rafael. _Bellissimo._ The Italians and their jawlines. How is he? Why don’t we find you a nice Italian boy to play with instead and do away with all this Arkham nonsense?”

“Mom.”

“Nice head of hair. Perhaps a narrow waist and good strong forearms. You’d like that, won’t you sweetheart?”

“Mom!”

“You know I had an Italian lover once. Only for a weekend, of course, but my goodness what a weekend that was.”

“Jesus Christ, Mother!”

“Darling!” his mother gasps in that softly chiding tone of hers. A dainty hand covers her small scandalized mouth. “We are Jewish!” 

Laughing, she shares her secret smile with him. She stops suddenly and sighs, looking at him with such softness that it threatens to break his resolve.

For a moment, Billy thinks she might cry. But Rebecca Kaplan’s blood is as blue as they bleed in the upper crust of New York society. She would never debase herself to public display of emotion, even in front of her favorite. Instead, she closes the distance between them and touches his cheek with an ungloved hand. “Oh Billy, this whole affair terrifies me.”

“Mom, I’ve told you. St. Castle’s is different now.”

Rebecca Kaplan scoffs. “Yes, I remember your powerpoint presentation.”

“There hasn’t been a single incident since the new administration took over.” 

This is an old point of disagreement between them. St. Castle’s is well known for the hazing and the bullying and that bizarre business that one time with the senior class and what appeared to be the ritualistic slaughter of the school mascot. Billy’s mum was horrified but his father thought the experience would build character. In the end, they respected him enough to give him final say.

“Bullies with a brain and a trust fund”, his mother says, leaning back in her seat and peering out the window. 

“See? Just like Manhattan, " he smiles.

She crosses her arms and rolls her eyes at him. “You know boys disappear in that castle, don’t you?” She turns to the window and narrows her eyes. “My god, how many miles of driveway must a castle have? Billy I do not like this. Not one bit.”

Yet she knows that he _has_ to do this. He has to find out what happened and he did his best to find the most palatable arrangement for her, he really did. And as daunting as St. Castle’s history is, the only alternative is a highschool down in the city proper and Rebecca Kaplan would sooner take a bat to Billy’s legs than let any gay son of hers go to _public_ school in a city that hasn’t had a democrat in office for the past forty years.

“Well you know, it isn’t just serial killers and cult leaders. More than half the presidents have gone to St. Castle’s.”

“Yes, darling; so have this one. You aren't making the point you think you are, sweetheart.”

“Poet laureates... Actual _Nobel_ laureates too, mom.”

So all things considered… a mixed bag. Rebecca Kaplan would just have to trust her son that he’d choose a more lucrative career path than sacrificial virgin to local pagan ritual.

“But let’s not fight anymore, mom, we’re here.”

As the car finally rounds to the main entrance, a sullen boy with a bright yellow umbrella begins making his way down the stairs and pulls open the car door for Billy.

“Goodbye, my darling,” Rebecca Kaplan says, kissing him once on each cheek and then on the forehead. “I love you.”

“You’re not coming with?” Billy asks, surprised.

“Oh Billy, sweetheart, you hapless puppy,” she says with a pained look on her face. “This is your first impression. You can’t let them see you with your _mother_.”

“Right, okay.” Very quickly, he throws his arms around her neck. She yelps and pretends to find it all so improper. “I love you, mom. Facetime later.”

“Really, Billy. No need for the theatrics,” she says as she melts into the embrace and kisses him again. Billy pretends that she doesn’t cling to him for a moment too long. Instead, he takes the chance to breathe in her perfume and commits it to memory. “Bises, darling.”

With a final kiss to her cheek, Billy steps out and under the fetcher’s umbrella

“I’m a student, not the help,” says the boy immediately, visibly sickened by the little mother-son moment that has been forced to endure. “And this is detention, not a part-time job or student liason or some shit like that. Come on, I don’t wanna miss dinner. Choji makes a mean béarnaise but it clumps up when it’s cold.”

Without waiting for a response, the boy turns and starts walking up the steps, not bothering to look back and make sure that Billy was safely under the umbrella.

Billy hears the car circle around the fountain and drive away. Looking over his shoulder, he sees the black silhouette receding until it is swallowed up by the rain. Beyond it spread the vague Arkham skyline, obscured by cloud and fog. 

“Careful, steps are slick,” the other boy says indifferently. Billy could hear the thick Massachusetts accent on him. “William, yes?”

“Yes. William Kaplan,” Billy said. “Please call me Billy.”

The boy gives him a sidelong look and nods. “Elijah. Elijah Bradley. Eli, if we’re friends. You’re not Arkham, are you Billy?”

“Did the accent give me away?”

Eli snorts. “Not really. Look around and tell me what you see.”

With two hands and a grunt, Eli pushed against the wooden double doors, which swung open noiselessly to a small foyer. A statue of a man—St. Castle, probably—towers more than ten feet over them. With one hand he brandishes a sword aloft and in the other, an open book. 

“Subtle, right?” Eli says with a snort. “This way.” He consults his phone and picks one of the three corridors leading away from the foyer.

The walls are mounted with sconces and oil paintings of what Billy imagines to be notable alumni and perhaps, benefactors. The polished floor was shiny and cobbled where it isn’t covered in thick carpet and ornate wooden tables line the walls, topped with bowls and vases and honest-to-god wall candelabras with the candles. Whatever artificial light it is that illuminates the space is cached in some hidden recesses of the curved ceiling. It is the very picture of ornate opulence that the old buildings of Arkham are famous for and though no stranger to opulence himself Billy could not help but admire the casual display of wealth.

“This is a castle, yes, but a young one, relatively. Not like those European types I’m sure you’re accustomed to. Lots of wood from the local forest. Castle’s castle. Someone’s idea of a joke. I’m sure it was funny all those centuries ago.” 

“Uh, it’s a nice place, I guess?” Billy says, trying his best not to sound too impressed.

“Look at the students.”

Billy does. They were all boys, as he has been happily expecting, roaming in small groups of two’s or three’s. All are in uniform though at varying stages of undress and it is only with concerted effort that Billy is able to stitch together what the whole uniform ought to look like: white shirt, black blazer and pants, black shoes, a black-and-silver striped tie. A lapel pin of a crest is the only thing that every student made sure to wear. Billy turns to look at Eli and notices that he too isn’t wearing the full uniform in proper fashion.

“They’re all dressed like hobos?” Billy tries again.

Eli laughs. “Okay, sassy pants. Technically correct. Anything else you notice?”

 _Yes. A lot of the boys are really cute_ , Billy smiles to himself but doesn’t say out loud. He shakes his head, as though to clear the errant thought.

Eli sighs.

“That’s how I know you’re not Arkham.”

“How’s that then?”

“You didn’t even realize that I’m the only black kid here.”

Billy frowns and looks around again. A tall muscular blond with a loose tie around his unbuttoned collar, catches his eye and smirks. Billy pulls at the hem of his shirt, suddenly feeling underdressed in his white shorts and blue sweater that his nana knitted for him. Another one, a brunette, also hot as fuck, trails behind the blond and glares at Billy. Billy averts his eyes and looks everywhere—anywhere—else. It’s true: there are no other black kids around.

“Oh my god. You’re right. I didn’t even notice.”

Eli sighs. “And that’s another problem all on its own.”

They walk up the grand staircase, a wide sprawling, piece of stone elegance where ten students could probably walk abreast. Two landings, cushioned by thick carpet. The smooth handrails were a polished deep brown that was probably mahogany, and the balusters were hand-carved with engravings of animals frolicking in their assorted habitations.

“This way, New York,” Eli says as they climb up and turn left into another long corridor. He pulls out a piece of paper and hums to himself. “All the way to the end and turn right. Your room is just up the stairs again, left corridor, then third door to the left. Pay attention, everything here looks the same.”

And so it does. The corridors repeat themselves like some sort of recursive pattern, one path identical to the one just before, a series of carpets, oil paintings, and paneled walls. One of the L-shaped corridors was lined with windows to one side, overlooking the stone courtyard where a great tree erupts in the middle and students cluster in groups, some reading books but most just hanging out. One group managed to smuggle a frisbee and was tossing it from one end to another, which was almost as long as a football field. 

Billy drags his finger across the wall as they walk. A faint map of the corridors forms in his mind and he keeps it there until he has it memorized. He could sense the age of the building and catches a whiff of the many secrets that it has borne witness to. If he wants to, he could probe deeper and find the hidden doors and passages that he’d read about on the school’s brochure. But no, not right now. The journey has exhausted him and he might need his energy for what’s to come later that night. Besides, who knows what dark things these walls are hiding. Better not look too deep in the dark, unless something looks back.

“It’s like that here,” Eli says out of nowhere, breaking Billy’s train of thoughts. 

“Huh?”

“The weather. It’s pretty erratic. It was pouring just fifteen minutes ago and now look. Sunshine.”

Billy looks out again and hums to himself. The sky is a sunset bruise and the clouds are sparse and thin. “Huh,” he said. “Curious.” 

“Well, that’s Arkham for you. City of Mysteries. Turn here again.”

It is another ten minutes of walking through the same repetition of corridors. Billy touches the wall now and then until he can tell them apart with just a bit of effort.

“Here.”

They stop in front of a brown wooden door with a golden handle. Identical to every other brown wooden door with a golden handle down the corridor, each spaced fifteen feet apart from the next.

Eli hands him a small leather bag. “Your welcome pack. With your key, schedule, and calendar. There’s a map in there too but don’t let anyone see you using it. Uniform’s all in the closet, tailored to fit, and the porters will carry the rest of your shit. They should be there by the time you come back from dinner. Welcome to St. Castle’s School for wayward boys. Do you have any questions? No? Fantastic. Get changed and follow the traffic to the dining room. Full uniform. I’ll see you there.”

The boy begins to turn away.

“Wait,” Billy says. “I do have a question.”

Eli sighs, a hobby of his, Billy realizes “All right. Let’s get on with it.”

Billy stares. “Uh, what?”

“You’re not the first kid to come to Arkham chasing some mystery, New York. What happened? Spent a weekend down in Old Arkham and saw something strange that has haunted you since you were six? Or let me guess, a whispering in the dark told you to come here? Wait, wait, no. It might be something incredibly stupid: you’re after Carcossa’s treasure.” 

Eli looks at Billy impatiently and then clicks his tongue. He lets out a deep breath and crosses his arms.

“I just wanted to know how to get to Municipal Hall,” Billy says evenly.

Eli stares at him for a moment before answering. “There’s a phone in your room. Dial 1 and you can charter a car anywhere in the city. It’s that kind of school.”

“Thank you.”

“Take care of yourself, New York. Many come to Arkham looking for ghosts. Half go home disappointed, half go mad, and half end up dead.”

“That’s one too many halves.”

Eli chuckles as he walks away. “You’d get it if you’re from Arkham.”

Billy thought he's done his research on St. Castle’s. Two months ago, he even snuck down to Arkham and, accompanied by his brothers, took a car up to Castle Hill. Of course, he chickened out at the last minute and missed the private tour that he had arranged but he thought he more than made up for that with the long hours trawling the internet for reviews, exposes, documentaries, and even alumni testimonies. 

And so he should have been prepared. This should not surprise him.

Yet it is one thing to read of St. Castle’s strange practices and a whole other thing to actually take part in its high traditions. And as one of the city’s oldest institutions, dinner at St. Castle’s is as high as traditions could go.

It is a highly formal and dramatized affair, almost theatrical: a full table setting for a four-course meal delivered by a small contingent of servers milling about in synchronized fashion. The boys have all cleaned up too; everyone is buttoned up in freshly pressed uniform, all done up with the school tie and the polished silver lapel pins and matching cufflinks that glittered prettily at the wrists. A far cry from the mess of testosterone that Billy witnessed in the corridors. 

But despite the handsome boys in their dashing clothes, it is the servers that are the true spectacle and shock to his progressive Manhattan sensibilities. Dressed impeccably in all white, they whirl around the grand dining hall with the stiff precision of automatons. They make no sound as they take away the plates and serve the meals, and the white masks that shroud their faces from hairline to chin made it impossible to tell one apart from the other. If he strips one naked and rips off that mask, Billy will not be surprised to find only gears and pistons behind. Yes, it’s the masks that made it all so uncanny. That famous atavistic custom that descendants of old Arkham’s gentry still practice in secret. He has read that the old blood of Arkham is a weird lot but this… 

Billy was seated with Eli and four other boys at a table near the back of the hall. Their table is a quiet one, unlike the others where conversation flowed easily (but politely, at least from a distance). Two of the other boys at his table have their dinner in silence and keep their eyes to their plates but the third, a black-haired kid who looks too young to be in St. Castle’s, excitedly makes conversation about the history program under the new department. Billy, of course, does his best to entertain the kid, whom he thinks was probably a prodigy of some sort under St. Castle’s early scholarship program. Eli, on the other hand, remains resolutely unmoved by the kid’s enthusiasm and spends the entire dinner snorting, glaring, and flipping the bird at the other boys who occassionally look over to their table.

“All right, gentlemen,” the Principal says after dessert is cleared and the tea is served. He is a short man with an easy smile, a goatee, and the long-suffering look of someone who knew he was too good for his job. From the looks around the hall, the boys don’t think much of him either. “I am, as your parents would say, retiring to my chambers. Be nice to each other, especially your new brothers, and enjoy the rest of your night. Welcome back to a new year in St. Castle’s Academy for Young Gentlemen. Let’s not kill anyone this year, hmm?”

With that, he raises his glass and Billy watches him down the amber liquid in one long gulp. There is scattered cheering and applause from the crowd but for the most part, the boys simply look on, faces as blank and inscrutable as their servants’ masks.

As soon as he leaves the hall, the tables immediately break up and a great cacophony erupted. The boys immediately depart from their tables in a clatter of silverware and chairs crashing to the ground and promptly reassort themselves into their cliques without so much as a backward glance. Ties are loosened, shirts are pulled untucked, and sleeves are folded up. Within the span of a minute, the stiff and proper gentlemen of St. Castle’s have completed their transformation.

“Come on, New York,” Eli says over the din, as he unbuttons his own shirt and loosens his tie. Billy notices that it’s just the two of them left at the table now. Even the AP kid is gone. “Before the hounds smell blood.” 

He tilts his head over to the center of the hall where four students stand in close circle, watching Eli and Billy. The other boys of St. Castle part around the four, giving them a wide berth as they make their way out.

“Come, come,” Eli says again. He grabs Billy by the elbow and drags him along.

“Where are we going?” Billy asks as they push through the crowd. “And is dinner like this every night?”

“Fridays, Sundays, and holidays. Don’t worry, they’ll send a formal invite on days of,” Eli says as they stroll down the corridors. “Come on, I’m taking you back to your room.”

Billy frowns. What about the boys? The cute, disheveled boys. 

“What? Why? I wanted to stick around and make friends?”

Eli clicks his tongue and shakes his head.

“Get real, New York. These boys don’t want to be friends with you.”

“Billy, it’s Billy Kaplan.”

“Kaplan. Right. That’s Jewish, right?”

Billy bristles and Eli smiles a triumphantly sad smile.

“That’s why.”

Billy feels the familiar rage rise in his chest. “That’s why what?”

They've arrived at his room and stopped right in front of the door. Around them, other boys 

Eli turns to him, face a measured mask of distant sympathy. It was almost clinical. “Look… uh... Billy. Arkham isn’t like other cities. Weird shit happens here every other week. And most of these boys can trace their daddy’s daddy’s daddy to some original Arkham family. They all grew up on the myths and legends of this city. Everyone knows everyone and when strangers come, they close ranks. Boys like us don’t belong here.”

Billy opens his mouth to protest but Eli holds up a hand and shakes his head.

“No, Billy. You have to understand this. This isn’t something you can fight or change,” he says, with a resolute hardness. _Believe me, I’ve tried_ , Billy could almost hear him say. “Now, I don’t know what you’re looking for here and if you’re really so dumb that you enrolled to this school out of your own free will. Whatever it is, I hope it’s worth it. But from one outsider to another, take this piece of advice: keep your head down and don’t try to make friends. And those four in the hall? Just stay off their radar. Every year, some upstart kid tries to cross them and it’s never pretty. Don’t be that kid this year, okay?” 

Billy considers the other boy for a moment and offers his hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll watch out for myself.”

Eli takes his hand and gives it a firm, practiced shake. “All right, you take care, man.”

Billy smiles, as the images flash through his mind: Eli leaving his grandparents’ home to live with a man he only met that day... the awe at first sight of St. Castle's gray facade, more imposing and impressive through Eli's eyes than Billy's own... the excitement of the early days in the elite boarding school, followed by the prompt and thorough disenchantment.

He falls deeper in to memory and more images surface: the boys’ laughter and the quiet… books scattered in the mud.

Billy withdraws his hand as though scalded. He'd dug too deep.

 _I’ll be your friend_ , he wants but knows better to say.

“I’ll see you around, Eli,” he mutters instead as he averts his eyes, ashamed. He turns the golden know and walks into the dark.

Billy sits at his desk and takes out the newspaper clippings he’s been collecting for the past four years. 

“Where are you?” he whispers to himself as he carefully lays them out on the table.

TEEN ATHLETE, OLYMPICS HOPEFUL, GOES MISSING: ORGANIZED CRIME SUSPECTED, one of the headlines reads.

ITINERANT WITNESSES QUESTIONED REGARDING MISSING BOY

HOMELESS SCOURGE CONTINUES TO AFFLICT DOWNTOWN ARKHAM

“What have you been doing?”

REPORTS OF PETTY CRIMES RISING IN MIDTOWN. 

ARKHAMITES BLAME PROPERTY PRICES ON HOMELESS EXODUS

Billy gathers the clippings and crumples them into a ball. With the lighter he’d snuck in his luggage, he lights the ball and throws it in the empty metal garbage bin. He checks the map again and makes sure that he’d laid it down on the floor as flat as he could.

Then, he takes the pin from their boy scout days and pricks his finger. He watches the blood well in a ruby drop and fall over the ashes in the garbage bin. He lets a few drops fall before shoving his hand in the bin and grabbing as much of the blood-ash mix as he could. Then, he holds the ashes loosely in his hands and stretched his arms over the map.

"Ow. Fuck."

 _This is stupid,_ he thinks, feeling indeed incredibly stupid. 

But too late now. What did he have to lose except for a few drops of blood and tetanus anyway?

So he mans up and, feeling a little silly, looks at the computer screen and reads out the words.

“Open map and thought show way. Find what’s lost and runaway.”

He tosses the ashes above his head and watches as they drift through the air, like black snowfall covering the map in an infernal winter.

“Ash show thought and blood give face. Pave me path to the one erased.”

The ash continues to fall over the map, randomly and without pattern.

 _Fuck_ , Billy thinks, disappointed for a moment. It isn’t working. 

_Maybe you aren’t magic after all_ , a faint sniggering voice whispers in his head.

No, he can’t believe that. He knows. He _knows_ deep in his bones that there's something... not quite right with him. Something that makes the lights flicker around him sometimes. Something that makes the glasses shatter at the dinner table when his brothers take it too far with the teasing. Something... that whispered to him in the night to come to Arkham. 

He rolls his shoulders and tries again. "Fuck it," he says as he slams the laptop shut with a loud snap. "Okay, I got this." The words should come from him alone and not from a self-help book he’d found online.

He turned inwards, listening and feeling to his own heartbeat, and conjured the words that he knew were his.

“Okay. Um… Let’s see." He closes his eyes and breathes slowly. "Same blood, same face; my will reknit what fate… um... displaceed”

He might have imagined a whisper, a soft exhale against the nape of his neck, and something deep in his heart gallops like a palpitation. Something is waking in his chest and taking hold.

“Be you near, or be you far,” he says loudly, almost shouting, more confidently now. His eyes snap open. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

The windows rattle, as though besieged by a great gale, and with a loud bang opens. "Be you near! Or be you far!" he cries out over the deafening wind. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

The wind blows against the ashes, scattering it around the room. Some of it get into Billy's eyes but he keeps them open. He watches the ash rain over the map, gathering, swirling, and gathering, like a malevolent storm blowing over the city of Arkham.

Billy’s first spell doesn’t work the way he hoped but he grins anyway, even as tears pour out his eyes.

“Found you, you jerk.”

Tommy 

Tommy Shepherd can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching him. It came a few minutes ago as a weird itch on the nape of his neck, the sort that wouldn’t go no matter how much he scratched. Almost like someone breathing down on him. Now, as he sniffs the air, it’s like a sneeze that just won’t come. He grunts irritably and shifts his position on his perch, a statue of a weeping woman jutting out of a stone wall.

“Anyone else smell smoke?”

He watches the human traffic below, that familiar sight of the weak, exhausted trail of men and women dragging their bodies home after a long day’s work. Tommy pities them. He really does. But not enough. And definitely not as much as he pities himself and his crew.

“Not here, Alpha.” Arms’ voice is a muffled drawl in his ear so pushes on the earpiece a few times to clear the static.

“No smoke here too,” Molly pipes in, their new recruit. 

“Take a shower, Speed,” the last of their quartet says. Tommy can hear the grin in David’s voice and he imagines the smell of adrenaline high. “Or are you just turning chicken?” 

He returns the imaginary grin. “You wish, P.”

P. Short for Prodigy. Sounds like _pee_ , from that one time during a mission that he knew better than to share with the rest of the Daredevils. It’s their private joke and he always makes it when they’re on the same team.

“Haha. Hilari-”

“Eyes up, Prodigy” Tommy says. He readjusts his stance again and feels every muscle and tendon in his body tense. “Target on site. All right, folks: Fatman has landed.”

He watches their target appear on the footbridge just five feet below him: the eponymous fat man in his beige coat and beige hat. Even by sight, he can tell that the fabric of the coat was expensive, just as Molly reported when she chose the mark, but the design is conservative. The kind that is obviously trying too hard not to get noticed. And in Arkham, the only people who dress like that are rich bozos who have something valuable to hide.

 _Good girl._ Tommy smiles. Just like he taught her. He licks his lips and waits for Fatman to hit his mark.

The footbridge they chose to strike tonight is a narrow one, where only four people could walk abreast, but it soars a hundred feet or so above the next footbridge—except at a specific point, just after the second gargoyle at its northeastern end, where another footbridge hides in the shadows ten feet directly below. That is the intercept point, where David will be waiting in case he needs an assist. Which he never has.

“Confirm the mark, Bunny,” he whispers, even though there isn’t a need to. A habit ingrained by the years in this trade.

“Mark confirmed,” Molly replies. “That’s Fatman. He’s just below you now. Go, Tommy, go!”

Tommy shakes his head and notes her slip. Two points to mention but he’ll go easy on her. This is her first mission, after all.

“Watch and learn, Bunny. Everyone in position?”

“In position,” three voices confirms at once.

“On my signal.” He waited for Fatman to get ahead, five, ten, fifteen paces. “Three… two… one. Go.”

A movement. In the middle of the bridge. To a casual observer at his end of the bridge, they wouldn’t see the change but Tommy knows what to expect. Arms is already playing the fainting girl routine, no doubt taking a few purses with her as she stumbles through the crowd and falls to the ground. The traffic slows as bystanders step around the convulsing girl and keep on walking with nothing more than a disinterested glance over the shoulder.

“Assholes,” Tommy mutters as he readies himself. It makes the job easier.

Just a few seconds now. He waits… waits… then, once the jam has reached the Fatman, Tommy makes his move.

With practiced grace, he drops five feet from his perch and lands deftly on the footbridge’s slippery stone parapet. He allows himself no more than two seconds to rebalance and reorient his proprioception, and then he is sprinting on a deadbolt. To his left is the dead drop, hundreds of feet from the cracked foundation of Arkham, and to his right is the press of human traffic on the footbridge, but neither the fear of falling nor the outraged squeals of pedestrians distract him. Right now, there is only Fatman and the briefcase in his left hand, held away from the rest of the pedestrians and right in the easy access of Tommy’s path. Tommy doesn’t think of the wads of cash. Watches. Hopefully not jewelry. He thinks instead of the distance diminishing between him and his target. Predator and prey. 

“Ten seconds to target,” he says as he flies through the air. “Get ready for support, Prodigy.”

“Roger.”

He wouldn’t need it but those are the rules and everyone follows them, even the legendary Speed.

Five seconds. Almost there.

The people on the bridge see him but by the time they figure out what was up, he is already far ahead.

He is a hawk, descending.

He counts in his head: _three… two… one._

His feet carries him forward as he allows the rest of his body to fall backwards. With a soft thud, he falls on his side on the parapet, still sliding forward with his feet first and one arm outstretched behind. The length of his body propels itself horizontally on the slick parapet, carried by the momentum of his sprint.

A few shrieks now and Fatman begins to turn. But it’s all over.

As he slides by Fatman’s hand, he hooks his fingers around the briefcase handle and easily grabs it from the loose grasp.

“See ya, sucker!” he couldn’t help but yell as he quickly springs forward, back on his feet in half a second and already running on the parapet.

“Package intercepted!”

He keeps running. Near the end of the bridge, the statues sit atop the parapets. Three gargoyles, waist-high, easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.

With one hand on the gargoyle head for support, he jumps over the first one like a hurdle, making sure to swing both legs _outside_ the bridge. 

One more over and the drop point is immediately behind.

“Hey! Stop that kid! Stop!” Fatman calls from behind him.

He reaches the second gargoyle and jumps. With a sudden change in momentum, he forces himself to sit still just behind the statue to reorient himself. One second later and he is easing himself down the side of the bridge, clambering down using the cobbled stone as foothold, and then dropping down in the dark.

He closes his eyes and his heart skips a beat. He knows the bridge below is part of a network of bridges for transporting cargo. Unlike the footbridges connecting the upper sections of the city, these bridges are rarely used at night and so remain in pitchblack darkness. To anyone watching, they just saw a boy jumping down to his death.

For a moment, he thinks he misremembered the map. Maybe it’s behind the _third_ gargoyle, not the second. Maybe he’s really plunging to his death now. Maybe—

His feet make contact and his knees immediately exert the necessary resistance to cushion the fall. Before David could grab him and pull him over to the correct side, he trusts his instincts and allows himself to fall to the right. An unnecessary gamble.

He feels the comforting thump of solid ground hitting his shoulder with a resounding thud.

“You fucking idiot,” David hisses at him later, after the debrief. “You could have died. Where do you get off pulling a stunt like that?”

Tommy rolls his eyes as he increases his speed, knowing that even on the roadway. David doesn’t have the balls to run as fast as Tommy would dare on the parapets. “Oh shut up, nobody died.”

“ _This_ time,” David says, winded. “My job was to pull you over so you don’t accidentally fall over the wrong side of the parapet. Into, you know… _certain death?_ ”

Tommy shrugs and doesn’t reply. They are running up the nexus now, near the center of midtown, where the main footbridges of this part of the city intersected. At this hour, there is hardly anyone using them. Just the occasional john looking for a good time and the unfortunate girls who feel that they have no other choice in life but to provide it. Tommy doesn’t think about how a lot of them look the same age as his sisters. 

“I’m serious, Shepherd!” David calls out as he falls behind. His voice is growing distant now. “If you insist on doing this again, you’d better find yourself a new spotter!”

 _Whatever_ , Tommy smirks to himself. 

He’d never needed anyone to catch him and he doesn’t intend to start now. And if it ever bites him in the ass… well, it isn’t like he’d be there to regret it anyway.

“I’ll meet you at our spot, Allen!”

Tommy runs and runs and runs. He isn’t winded. He isn’t tired. He’s alive. 

He has been running for years now, from city to city, and state to state, but it is only ever in Arkham that he had ever felt like he is _flying_.

It is an old city and there is nothing like it in the world. It is a world of soaring spires and vaulting footbridges of brick and stone hundreds of feet above the traffic of vehicles. The massive statues, sitting atop parapets, lining the streets, and jutting out of the sides of buildings, are familiar friends to Tommy—accomplices, even, to his trade. These are the things that made Arkham famous all over America and they are what called Tommy there. But unlike his gargoyle and angelic friends, with their hands held to their weeping faces or outstretched towards the sky pleading to be liberated from the stone that holds them fast, Tommy is free.

He runs now, across the tile roof of some warehouse, and leaps over the gap and catches the outstretched hand of the statue of a woman. With a swing, he kicks off the wall and changes the angle of his momentum, so that he falls ten feet down in the direction of the nearest footbridge. He lands deftly on the roadway and rolled forwards a few times to break the momentum.

He springs up, standing, not even panting, and grins at the full moon above him, beyond the network of crisscrossing footbridges overhead. For one giddy moment, he imagines snow falling around him, only for some reason it is black as ash. He cups his hands over his mouth and howled into the night. 

This is Arkham and he is the king that will never fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always seek to improve my writing so do leave a comment, good or bad. Your thoughts, dear reader, are always welcome.
> 
> Talk to me on Tumblr!  
> http://kleos-aphthit0n.tumblr.com


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